If anything, 2026 has made it clear that cybersecurity is no longer a background concern—it’s front and center, touching almost every major story of the year. Yes, wars are still raging, the climate continues to deteriorate, and we’re one hard sneeze away from the next global pandemic.
But underneath it all is a digital current that touches everything: wars on both digital and physical fronts, governments weaponizing citizens’ data against them, botnets quietly undermining democratic institutions, nation-state hackers targeting civilian infrastructure from power grids to water systems, and companies paying for ransomware and hosting organizations in large numbers. Attacks are becoming bolder, more destructive and harder to prevent.
Halfway through an already terrifying year of digital attacks and hybrid warfare, we take a look at some of the worst hacks and breaches ever and how they could affect us moving forward.
Questions remain about DOGE’s massive swiping of Social Security data
A year later, after operatives with a group of government destroyers led by Elon Musk Known as the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE). we dismantled and dismantled federal agencies from within, we are still learning about the data breaches that occurred under their watch.
It is not clear what happened to some of them after they entered the DOGE Social Security Administration the country’s most sensitive informationThe lawsuits are pending in federal court. The most alarming whistleblower claim is that DOGE uploaded a live copy of the Social Security database to an unsecured third-party server, causing confusion as to what was stored there. This database claims to have Social Security numbers and related personal information of most living Americans.
In court filings, the Social Security Administration doesn’t know exactly what’s on the server, but says DOGE has contracted with an outside political advocacy group under the guise of finding evidence of voter fraud, something President Trump has done. continues to claim without any evidence. Fears are that the database could be misused to target Americans for fraudulent reasons.
said two top House Democrats at the Social Security Administration, who have investigated some of DOGE’s activities. that exposure government’s Social Security database “could be the largest data breach in our nation’s history.”
Hackers are increasingly targeting water systems and energy networks
In Europe, cyber-attacks targeting civilian power and water supplies, such as power plants and dams, have been a worrying trend of late. Several hacks attributed to (or at least partially blamed on) Russia have caused real-world damage to communities and populations.
Poland’s power grid was targeted malware that destroys a computer at the tail end of last year, as well as a Swedish thermal station and a collapsing Norwegian dam water value of pools. Hackers targeted Poland earlier this year its water treatment plantsIt shows that Russia’s hybrid warfare antagonism continues to extend beyond the digital realm.
Now, thanks to the recent war between the US and Israel against Iran, there are warnings that Iranian hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the US. This includes private water utilities, which remain soft targets for hackers and often lack basic cybersecurity protections.
Iranian government hackers have hacked a Stryker missile launcher
Speaking of Iran, a March cyberattack on US medical technology company Stryker saw Iranian hackers break in and remotely wipe tens of thousands of employee devices in one stepcaused widespread disruption of the company’s activities for several days.
The breach was a marked shift in Iran’s hacking tactics during the ongoing war in the Middle East, with Iran breaking away from typical espionage and hack-and-leak operations to aid the country’s political gains, leading to devastating hacking attacks in apparent response to the war. US government was attributed to the hacker group Behind the leak to a branch of Iranian intelligence. The breach is over has a material impact on Stryker’s first-quarter earnings after regaining control of its systems.
Guide to ShinyHunters disruptive hacking campaigns
The ShinyHunters continued their hacking campaigns, targeting dozens of companies with simple but highly effective voice phishing techniques. English-speaking hackers are adept at tricking companies into changing access to their internal systems by pretending to be IT support or, conversely, an employee who has forgotten their password.
Few people know better than education technology giant Instructure the payoff that a ShinyHunters hack can yield. Hackers breached the company’s leading learning management system, Canvas, to steal personal information and personal data belonging to more than 30 million students and employees. When the company didn’t pay the hackers’ ransom, the hackers got back in and Crashed school login screens for Canvasused by students to access exam and course materials. This second hack happened during school finals and disrupted exams for students in the US. Despite efforts by the FBI to dissuade the company from paying, Instructure eventually paid the ransom.
Instructure wasn’t the only company targeted by the ShinyHunters hackers so far. The gang is behind some of the biggest breaches in terms of the number of records stolen, including about 40 million records from internet provider Charter and At least 6 million customer records from Cruiseliner Carnivalamong other victims higher education, financeand government.
The supply chain is under attack targeting open source projects and large technology companies
A series of ongoing, simultaneous and sometimes overlapping attacks on open source developers has resulted in massive hacks targeting major tech companies and their customers.
Some of the biggest names in security including Aqua Security’s Trivy tool, Bitwardenand Checkmarkxalong with others major open source projectsthis year allowed hackers to steal passwords, credentials and other sensitive tokens from the computers of anyone who installed a backdoored copy of the software, or automatically updated pre-installed software to download the malware.
These attacks used stolen credentials to spread further, leaving large companies downstream that relied on the targeted software. AI giant OpenAI and web hosting company Vercel. With a new hack almost every week, the open source world remains a vulnerable target in the wider tech ecosystem.
The FBI’s surveillance system was breached and a “major cyber incident” occurred“
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to declare a “major cyber incident”. in April, prompting a legally required disclosure to Congress after it determined that one of its surveillance systems had been breached. According to reports, there is a possibility of disruption exposed phone numbers of the targets under surveillance by federal agents.
Chinese spies have been accused of breaching an unclassified network that held sensitive information about surveillance targets for wiretapping and other communications interceptions, such as pen register returns. The breach is likely to cause “demonstrable harm” to US national security, alerting lawmakers.
The Hasbro hack caused weeks of downtime
Toymaker giant Hasbro is the latest example of what happens when a large corporation faces a security incident and is unprepared. A few weeks after they discovered the hackers on their systems at the end of MarchThe 103-year-old company was largely offline, with its website unavailable and unable to serve its customers.
The company, which owns big brands like Transformers, Peppa Pig and Dungeons & Dragons, has said little about the incident itself, what data (if any) was taken and whether it paid the hackers. But a single breach can affect the financial position of a company delayas the company scrambled to manage the incident.
Hasbro he said As of mid-May, the hackers are no longer on its systems and its recovery is ongoing. But the financial costs of the breach and the damage to its business are expected to materialize in the coming months and be significant.
Millions of passports and driving licenses were exposed
In the past few months alone, there has been an increase in the exposure of key information about people’s sensitive government-issued identification documents, including passport and driver’s license scans, left online. From hotel registration system and a money transfer program a prison payphone provider and UK visa servicethese services exposed the personal files of more than two million people, which could have been easily misused. Many were caused by simple security mistakes that could have been easily avoided with basic cybersecurity practices.
These massive data breaches come as closed community apps and websites increasingly rely on “know your customer” checks to force users to verify their identities before being granted access. proposes age verification laws require adults to undergo similar identity checks to access large areas of the internet.
The logic is that the more spills, the less effective these identity verification systems are, as they can be. easily abused with a stolen or leaked passport or driver’s license. Further deployment of these ID-collecting systems will inevitably lead to more data breaches and security breaches.
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